I’m doing a forum this Wednesday in New York on “The Real Cost of Unemployment” — it’s free and open to the public as long as you reserve tickets.

The forum is as much about the future of employment in America as it is unemployment in the right here and now. When it comes to unemployment, we’re facing a precipice where continued unemployment will drive more families into a spiral of debt; loss of homes; and diminishment of educational opportunities as property taxes fall. And then there’s the question of what will happen to people told that they could go to college and find steady, even fulfilling employment as a result; but who can find jobs every now and then, not careers.

So, as an alternative to bemoaning our fate and handwringing over the end of life as we know it, plenty of us are trying to figure out what will work to re-employ those who’ve slipped through the cracks (blue and white collar) and create new opportunities for the people graduating into a harsh job market.

For years, technology has been touted as a path to reviving the economy. Yet a recent piece in the Economist gave this little reality check: “Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon collectively employ just 113,000 people, a third of GM’s payroll in 1980.” The article adds:

Americans’ entrepreneurial self-esteem is now embodied by Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon. These are indeed fabulously innovative companies with world-beating business models. Yet one wonders if they are increasingly the exception, not the rule, and if the passing of Mr Jobs is simply the most prominent example of a broader decline in American entrepreneurship. According to JPMorgan, in the late 1990s, employment at start-up companies regularly grew 1.2m per quarter. That has fallen to 700,000 since the current recovery began. John Haltiwanger, probably the leading economist on employment dynamics by firm size, finds similar trends. Entrepreneurship and innovation, of course, are not the same thing. Yet even if American innovation is fundamentally sound, there remains the more unsettling problem of how narrowly its fruits are shared.

There are a many different ways that technology can employ more people. One is the tech/manufacturing sector. An August New York Times article profiled a lithium ion battery factory in Michigan. As it examined this one company, it weighed tech and manufacturing, and said the future of tech-driven jobs could be one that “looks less like Google and more like Ford.” Writer John Gertner added:

One challenge to moving in this direction may be that our banks, hedge funds and venture capitalists are geared toward investing in financial instruments and software companies. In such endeavors, even modest investments can yield extraordinarily quick and large returns. Financing brick-and-mortar factories, by contrast, is expensive and painstaking and offers far less potential for speedy returns. Berger maintains that for the economy to get “full value” from our laboratories’ ideas in energy or biotech — not just new company headquarters but industrial jobs too — we must aspire to a different business model than the one we have come to admire.

A completely different way that tech is helping to solve the unemployment crisis is through crowd funding. Companies like Kickstarter (profiled here) and Indie Go Go are helping to fund a remarkably heterogeneous array of projects, from movies to housewares to toys. The Kickstarter model has been discussed at length. One question circling back to jobs is whether this could help create a cohort of people who, in what we once considered a normal job market, would work and maybe do projects on the side, but who instead choose a path of serial small-scale entrepreneurship enabled by crowd funding. Whether or not crowd funding can achieve a critical mass nationally will bear some longitudinal study of how people use it. A major factor will be whether the model expands in adoption beyond people who are tech early-adopters and risk-tolerant to people who might use some crowd funding engine (perhaps one not even in existence) to restructure their work lives entirely.

As these long-plays for a revived job market are being worked out, we’re looking for shorter term solutions. That’s one reason we’re hosting the forum. It’s time to put our collective brainpower together and see what we can make out of the job market, not just wait for anyone else to come up with solutions.

========

The forum “The Real Cost of Unemployment” starts with a reception at 6 and a program at 7. Our guests include investor Ryan Mack, personal finance commentator (Today Show, CNN) and author of “The Real Cost of Living” Carmen Wong Ulrich; and Columbia University Professor Dorian Ward, who studies labor markets. Join us if you’re in NYC.

You can also join the Public Insight Network, a group of individuals who offer their perspectives to public radio, by participating in our survey on the impact of unemployment on your friends, family, community, and perhaps yourself. Go to the survey here.

Thanks so much!